Anti-Trident Ken Livingstone has announced that he will co-chair Labour’s defence review. Corbyn clearly doesn’t trust his pro-Trident Shadow Defence Secretary Maria Eagle to do it herself. Guess on whom Jezza’s top new defence strategist blames the Paris attacks:

“All these terrorist attacks, the statements they make on their websites and so on are all about foreign policy… it’s the endless interventions of Britain and America and France in Arab countries that has come back to haunt us. After the fiasco of Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America and France are just not credible in this.”

Yes, merely 48 hours after the attacks, Ken really was piling into the French…

He has form: after the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three and injured 200, Livingstone blamed America for “fuelling” the atrocity. He told Iranian state television channel Press TV:

“There was such ignorance in the Bush White House about Islam and the history of so many disputes that exist in the Middle East. People get angry — they lash out. It’s the whole squalid intervention that has disfigured the record of the western democracies and I think fuels the anger of the young men, who — as we saw in Boston — went out, and, out of anger and a demand for revenge, claimed lives in the west.”

Speaking to Kremlin-controlled Russia Today last year, Ken called for alliance with Russia and Iran and repeatedly defended Putin over Ukraine:

“Russia must be a key player in it, Iran should be a key player… [on Ukraine] You cannot blame Putin. This is an absolute tragedy, but it is not something planned and plotted by Putin. And that is the line being dished out from Washington and the British government… Let’s make it clear, Russia did not destabilize Ukraine… Now you have got a Russian president who puts Russia’s interests first.”

What about some of Ken’s other foreign policy views? In 2009 he told Israelis “don’t complain” when Hamas terrorists fire rockets at their civilians:

What is it with Corbyn’s new defence strategist and blaming the victim?

Quote of the Day

Dominic Raab wrote in his letter of resignation…

“This is, at its heart, a matter of public trust,” he told the PM, concluding: “I cannot reconcile the terms of the proposed deal with the promises we made to the country in our manifesto at the last election… I believe that the regulatory regime proposed for Northern Ireland presents a very real threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom. I cannot support an indefinite backstop arrangement, where the EU holds a veto over our ability to exit…”